Call to Arms: Update

08Apr

According to Wowhead there was some clarification made by Blizzard last night in regards to Call to Arms, particularly about the extra incentive reward.

The extra items and such that you get come in the Satchel of Exotic Mysteries, which is similar to the satchels you get for running random dungeons while you level. Except for one very key point – these satchels are BoA, meaning you can farm randoms on your tanking alt and send the rare mounts or pets to your main. If you get your hands on the Baron’s mount, but you’ve already got one, just send it over to another one of your alts.

There was also false information put out in relation to the flasks and elixirs. Rather than being suited to the spec of the tank/healer that you get the satchel on they will be randomly generated so that you have a variety of flasks to send to different characters (or sell on the AH if you don’t have one that can use it).

They also clarified that the drop rate of the rare mounts is going to be exactly the same as the actual mount drop rate from the bosses that drop them, which addresses one of my concerns that I hadn’t vocalized yet.

I think making these items BoA does give it a lot more potential to be successful as players will be more likely to switch to their alts when they don’t have anything pressing to do and queue up for a random at a chance to win those mounts for their main. It also has the potential to overcome the problems I mentioned yesterday about tanks getting the items they’re interested in and then not using the Dungeon Finder anymore. Being able to send them to other toons is a pretty big deal in my opinion.

As for whether or not this will help it be more than just a band-aid fix, I think this will definitely add some more longevity to it, but I’m not convinced this is the definitive answer. As far as mounts are concerned, as they’re the major draw here, I don’t know how long a series of ground mounts is really going to thrill people in a world we can now fly in, but at least they did pick some of the more sought-out mounts to use for it.

I do think that this was a big step in the right direction for being such a small change, and at this point I’m ready to kick back and watch to see how it all turns out. Making them BoA may very well encourage a large number of players to tank on their alts to win mounts for their mains, which may prove to be just the kind of response that Blizzard is looking for.

The point in doing it is to gear up the DPS who have a harder time getting gear because it takes them longer to get dungeon queues, so they didn’t want to reward tanks and healers, who already have short queues, with even more gear which leaves the DPS even further behind the curve.

But if you give the extra justice points to the DPS then you take some of the tanks/healers out of the pool because they queue as DPS instead for the extra justice points.

While I think rewards for DPS would help, I can see why the solution to this particular issue really has no other option than to be directed at the tanks and healers.

Indirectly? That’s really hard to say since we don’t know how the honor for justice is going to play out all its own.

We know the conversion rate (375 of one for 250 of the other), but we don’t know which method people are going to prefer for grinding. If I were a betting man, I’d say we’re going to see more people (dps especially) farming BG’s rather than dungeons to get their JP because it’s both faster and easier to get honor than it is to get JP.

In a night of farming BG’s I can easily get 1500 Honor which is 1000 Justice Points. I haven’t farmed dungeons to see how much JP I can earn a night, but I suspect it’s much less as well as more costly in repairs.

So I don’t really see *this* impacting the Honor for JP so much as I see Honor and JP impacting this. The two of them together might be just the fix we’re looking for, and I may very well delve into that more in another post if I can find the time.

I guess, well, I just feel that a lot of what Blizz is trying to do falls under good intentions, but there always seems to be emergent behaviors that are unexpected. I’m not feeling very articulate today (like–at all), but what I’m trying to say is, being relatively new to the game, and experienced some of the frustrations I have as a DPS, (dime-a-dozen), and witnessed first-hand some of the worse of human nature (and some, but less, of the best), I just wish sometimes the rag-tag PUG experience was a bit more generous to all. If I need a brain, he needs a heart, and the other is lacking in courage, maybe we can work together so we can find our way home? I have had friends who have their boons taken from them from “friends,” ninjas need roll for fake alts, and recount scores thrown in faces, and trash talk that would make an NFL player blush. I am not proposing an “agree or disagree” here – I truly am sitting on the “wait and see” chair- I hope it’s a good thing, and the emergent behaviors that result raise the level of kindness and fun for all.

The player behavior is something we’ve spoken on for quite a while. People being dicks has nothing to do with Blizzard, though, that’s normal behavior on the internet in general thanks to anonymity. When you get into social sites that have no form of moderation, or very little, you’ll find those dicks everywhere taking out their frustrations on others or getting a kick out of insulting, attacking, or making fun of others. It’s the crueler side of human nature unleashed in full because there’s nothing anybody can do to stop them.

This change isn’t going to fix that, nor is any other change they ever put in place. When you use LFG you’re going to find your good groups and you’ll find your bad groups as well. Some people claim they’ve never seen a good group while others like myself see a bad group maybe twice a week at the most. With millions of players, you just never know who you’ll run into.

People who want loot for their alts are going to roll for it because they can. Blizzard can limit them to not rolling on things they can’t use in the first place, but they can’t judge a character’s current gear and say “you don’t need this because you have better” and not let them roll on it.

Whether or not you see people getting a bit more cheerful in random groups isn’t likely to happen because of something Blizzard does, it’s more likely going to be simple luck of the draw. I make an effort to be friendly in any random that I run, but not everyone is like me. Some are quite the opposite, but there’s almost nothing you can do about that.

I agree that this is a step in the right direction, but ultimately this change seems unlikely to affect the tank supply in LFD.

Previously, Blizzard has tried to address the tank shortage by making more characters able to tank. Bears and paladins became viable sometime during BC. Death Knights — a hero class that could tank in any spec! — were added. Leather with +def was removed, making bear gearing easier. Dual spec was released. None of these did much to solve the problem.

This new approach seems to have given up on making more characters able to tank and is, instead, trying to get existing tanks to tank more. I think this is the appropriate approach; tanking as a playstyle isn’t for everybody, so efforts to get players without a tanking mindset to tank are probably doomed to failure.

That said, these incentives seem really weak. My suspicion is that the value of the goodie bag will be less than half my repair bill for a single night of raiding. For a 40+ minute heroic, that’s not a very good way to make money. Similarly, a Baron run and a trip through MgT can probably be completed before you ever loot the bag.

Hopefully Blizzard is playing it safe with these rewards and we can look forward to stronger incentives in 4.2. But I think that this approach — having Blizzard set the reward amount — is somewhat weak, at least as far as gold is concerned. Why not have players set the value of a tank via a market mechanism? If a tank is worth 200g from each of 3 impatient dps and the tank thinks 600g is a fair price, why can’t LFD help to arrange that transaction for them?

Ghostcrawler could offer me a 100% chance at a free pony at the end of the dungeon run and I still will decline to tank a PUG with my warrior. It’s just not worth stress. Especially since I am learning to tank again, and it’s a different class for me. I was originally a paladin tank.